Tuesday, August 2, 2016

From McCarthy to Trump

Mr. Buffett quoted a famous rejoinder to Senator Joseph
McCarthy during his 1950s anti-Communist hearings: "Have you no sense of
decency, sir?"

Cannot improve on that. No sense trying.

That rejoinder to McCarthy was made during a televised
Senate hearing by Joseph Welch, the attorney the army retained to defend it
from McCarthy's slander that it was inept and harboring Communists.

Leading to up to that justly famous line, Welch said, "Until
this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your
recklessness."

By that standard — cruelty, recklessness — Trump is the
second coming of McCarthy. Roy Cohn, McCarthy's factotum, is a link, arguably
an agent of contagion, having been Trump's close buddy and lawyer.

I'm not surprised the old shit doesn't go away, isn't neatly
recycled, isn't always reduced to useful compost. But it's alarming how well
Donald Trump brings the very worst of the worst of the old crap back.

McCarthy was not running for president. And he hit his wall
when attacking the army, as Trump in his rabid way has done, by attempting to
defame Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son was killed by an IUD in Iraq.

McCarthy came to his end soon after that Senate hearing.
True, liquor helped kill him. Trump, who is dry so far as we know, though I
suspect drug abuse — amphetamines, of one sort or another — clatters on.

Is this progress or regress from McCarthy's day?

Is it both?

McCarthy was disowned by his own party, defrocked, thrown
out.

s

Trump has not been similarly disowned by his kind, who, it
seems, can't live with, can't live
without him.